Conventionally, before a computing device can use a peripheral device, some setting up must take place at the computing device. This setup process is referred to hereinafter as installation of the peripheral device. For example, the computing device might need to know some information about the peripheral device being installed and/or the computing device might need to know some information regarding, for example, how to activate the peripheral device, and how to configure and control information sent to or received from the peripheral device (referred to hereinafter collectively as “support information”). Oftentimes, at least some of this support information is provided to the computing device in the form of configuration files and/or an installed set of executable instructions known as a device driver (e.g., a printer driver). The device driver can then be utilized with, for example, a processor and operating system of the computing device to activate and use the peripheral device. Accordingly, different device drivers are typically made available for different combinations of peripheral devices, operating systems, and/or processors.
In some cases, it is undesirable to continually maintain such support information on a computing device. For example, when the relationship between a computing device and a peripheral device is transient in nature (e.g., the user is merely visiting the location in which the peripheral device is located), the user of the computing device and/or the administrator responsible for the peripheral device might not want such support information to be maintained on the computing device. A user of a computing device might also want to avoid keeping such support information in an effort to help keep the number of peripheral devices associated with the computing device manageable and/or to remove invalid peripheral devices from the computing device.